The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

AUTHOR: Paul Elie
PUBLISHED: 2003
GENRE: Religion/History

I have no idea what made me pick up this book at Barnes and Noble.  It might have been the 30% discount.  (I was working there at the time.)  After I bought it, it sat, then I lent it to my mom.  I had probably owned it for 2 years before I actually sat down and read it. 

I can't tell you what it was.  But once I actually started it, I couldn't put it down. 

The Life You Save May Be Your Own is 4 biographies in one: those of Thomas Merton, Trappist monk; Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement; Flannery O'Conner, literary prodigy and master of the art form of the southern grotesque; and Walker Perry, a doctor turned novelist.  Spread across the country and across the early twentieth century, the four never met.  They are unified, however, in their writing, in what Perry called a "predicament shared in common": the problem of how to express and build their faith through their art in the modern era.  Their works marry faith and art, Catholic tradition and American culture, to form a singular moment in literary history. 

Elie subtitles his book "An American Pilgrimage", a reference to that particularly American sense that we are all looking for something greater.  In describing Percy's early stories, Elie states that Percy felt, "the modern predicament makes pilgrimage impossible.  In the modern world... all experience is always secondhand, planned and described for one's consumption in advance... the modern person is doomed to an imitation of life."  His fellow authors often felt the same.  But what is more universally longed-for than the successful pilgrimage, an act that, at its heart, is a really just a search for meaning?  And what are we to do if that search is no longer an option?  All four writers would devote their lives and thousands of pages to answering these questions, each in their own unique ways.

These four authors lead fascinating lives, completely apart from the writings they left to the world.  O'Connor was a Catholic in the Protestant south, suffering from lupus.  Perry, forever trying to escape a family history of depression and suicide, gave up a medical career to write.  Morton left a life in New York for Kentucky and a Trappist Order that demanded silence and disconnect from the world.  Day devoted virtually her entire adult life to the poor and the hungry, carrying the Catholic Worker movement on her shoulders.  All except O'Connor were converts to the religion they would so embrace and that they would come to represent. 

"We have all know the great loneliness," Day wrote in her book of the same name.  But at the same time, it is this same universality - this same catholicism - that will save us: "the only solution," Day continued, "is love, and that love comes with community"; we must "practice the presence of God" by seeing God in each other.  It's hard not to be inspired. 

LENGTH: 472 pages
MAINSTREAM OR NOT: No - not this book or its subjects
SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT: This may not be everyone's cup of tea, but if you're at all interested, give it a chance.